The one with The Shadow Heart.

The one with The Shadow Heart.

It was easy to pick "LOVE" for my first project simply because it should be the most important purpose of our lives, and yet is one of the most difficult feelings to truly express through an object.

Love means many different things to different people and is a complicated emotion. It is not possible to define love by one particular standard. So in order to capture the true meaning of love, I needed to understand it’s underlying nature. My thought process led me to two key facts:

It can be felt, but cannot be touched.

It is always present, but not always shown.

It is a pure emotion that inspired me to create an object that would help people to express their feelings of love. How could I truly and accurately embody this invisible but ever-present feeling? I wanted an object that could draw a parallel to nature of love: always there, but not always seen. (it makes it more precious.)

Then I realized the similarities in the appearance of a shadow - an image cast on a surface, following the shape of an object intercepting light. Then couple that with the more obvious heart symbol that is used as a universal representation of love, perhaps because it is an emotion that comes from your heart.

Now my mission was trying to create a shape that did not outwardly appear as an actual heart, but would cast a shadow of it. This, I feel, is the embodiment of love not always being seen, but always being present.

After several attempts and different prototypes, I successfully created the perfect model of a “Shadow Heart”, that I could easily fashion into pendants for necklaces.